Jewess Tattooess

‘Ye
shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor tattoo any marks
upon you: I am the Lord.’ (Leviticus 19: 27–28)

Jewess
Tattooess is an interdisciplinary solo performance piece by
live artist Marisa Carnesky exploring the Jewish taboo against tattooing in
relation to the artist’s own Jewish cultural heritage. It examines Jewish
superstition, folklore, religious rituals, and symbols to create a performance
language that combines actions and movement, film and video, live performance
video projections, original electronic sound and music, installation,
fairground illusions and storytelling. It also incorporates an action of live
tattooing.
During the Holocaust, the Nazis tattooed the arms and stomachs of millions of
Jewish people incarcerated in the concentration camps. This act specifically
and deliberately contravened Jewish law as proscribed in the Torah (note the
above quotation).
Jewess Tattooess explores the cultural and religious
implications of a Jewish woman who, by choice, is heavily tattooed—tattooed not
as a numbered victim, but as an autonomous individual.
The work draws on images of traditional tattooed ladies as exhibits in
sideshows, Jewish folklore, fairy tales, and storytelling. It explores the
historical archetypes of the Wandering Jew, the Jew as Nomad and Outsider, and
the Jewish Diaspora.
The non-linear nature of the narrative reflects the tattooed woman’s physical
body: a body of pictures and symbols; archetypes; living illustrations of
memories, dreams, nightmares, and ghosts.

…
»Carnesky’s voice and her body tell the many, interwoven, dramatic stories of
those who both belong and do not belong, bringing into the open unresolved, and
strikingly actual, conflicts of ownership, enforced identity and cultural
displacement. At the same time, her voice and her body talk also of the freedom
that the reclaiming of a shared experience bring to all the invisibles who
transit through lands and through history; of the journey written in her own
DNA, deeply in conversation with an history that is as much her own as common
to many. … If Rapunzel is a sex-slave, forced to give up her body, her
citizenship and her humanity, the Jewess Tattooess is like a magician
purposefully reclaiming her captive soul through a bleeding star of David.«
(Betti Marenko)

Devised and performed by: Marisa Carnesky; film: Alison Murray; soundtrack:
Dave Knight, Katherine Gifford, James Johnson; lighting design: Rose Parnis;
costume: Nicola Bowery; tattoo: Alex Binnie

In cooperation with: Cankarjev dom